A request via Twitter for the Denver Tea Room’s chicken salad turned up a few retro recipes. The chicken recipes appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on July 14, 2001. And Ellen Sweets wrote about the lemon pie in the July 20, 2005 Denver Post, in her “Search Me” column.

“From time to time we still receive requests for the Denver Tea Room’s chicken a la king and pecan chicken salad. To get the original recipes, we contacted former Tea Room executive chef Fred Batchelor who is still serving the chicken dishes and other Tea Room favorites as chef at the Springwood Retirement Campus in Arvada near Ward and Ralston roads,” wrote Meitus.

“I still make it the same way from the recipes I was given,” Batchelor says. “No changes.” Here are two of the recipes. For true authenticity, a little cut-out piece of puff pastry should sit atop each serving of chicken a la king, he told Meitus.

Julia Child would have been 100 on Aug. 15, 2012. We are celebrating her with a week of our favorite recipes from “The French Chef” and her many books.

Marty Meitus, former food editor at the Rocky Mountain News, writes about meeting Child in 1990 and shares some of her favorite recipes in our Aug. 15 Food section:

This is a great recipe for summer. Don’t use dried, canned breadcrumbs — make them yourself. There is another version in “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home,” which adds Parmesan cheese and dried herbes de Provence, so feel free to play with the recipe.

Middle Eastern cooks know how to chill. But so much of their inspired desert cuisine is chock-full of wheat. Couscous and tabbouleh were favorites of mine before my innards decided that gluten was my dietary Kryptonite.

Luckily, I have lots of company in avoiding gluten, and I live on Colorado’s Front Range, where you can’t swing a big baguette without hitting a health-food store (or chain grocery) willing to supply you with prepared or semi-prepared gluten-free food. But I haven’t seen a tabbouleh mix among them yet.

And oh, the places it’s led me. One of those places was plunking down a check to buy a CSA share from Native Hill Farm and farmers Nic Koontz and Katie Slota. You remember them from the Farmers of the Front Range calendar, the one that made them locavore pin-ups. The above photo is from their CSA shareholders’ welcome potluck, where I got to eat that pretty salad and some pork green chili and goat cheese and local salsa and a ton of other good things.

And when I got an email that they’d have some more greens at the Farmer’s market that Saturday, I went. And I kind of lost control. A bag of pea shoots. A bag of arugula. A bag of spinach, a bag of dinosaur kale, a bag of gorgeous purple lettuce. That’s five, count ’em, five, bags of greens. And then, because so many other bags of greens have gone liquid in my fridge lately, I gave myself the challenge of eating (or sharing) all those bags in seven days.

Aarón Sanchez grew up in the food business. At 36, he’s already been on the Food Network for 10 years. Before that, he learned his way around the kitchen with his mother, Zarela Martinez, who ran a catering business in El Paso, Texas, before moving to New York and opening the popular (but closed in 2011) Zarela in 1987.

But enough about Mamá.

Sanchez has come into his own, with New York restaurants Centrico and Tacombi, and Mestizo in Kansas City. He’s all over the Food Network, most notably as a judge on the “Chopped” shows. The latest season of “Chopped All-Stars” premiered Sunday.

Seriously. Who says salad has to be chilled? I say heat it up. Salad greens that have seen some fire take on a whole new flavor profile: Bitter edges get rounded out, nuttiness is amplified and chlorophyllic notes deepen. Try it, you’ll see.

Brian Rocheleau, known as Rosh, stands with a seeing-eye-dog in the background, telling patrons what to expect in the Boulder Blind Cafe

We began arriving at 7:30, stepping from the evening darkness into the warm light of Boulder’s Integral Center, just north of downtown. Shortly after 8, the 100 or so patrons of The Boulder Blind Cafe lined-up before a white curtain, placing their hands on the shoulders of those before of them.

At the front of every line: a blind person. They were the leaders.

Once we passed the curtain, everything turned black. I could not see Cathy, the effervescent woman I had just met whose shoulder I was gripping. I could not see my hand when I brought it inches from my face.

We were here to eat, to talk, to listen to music and poetry and to ask questions of our blind leaders.

There are still tickets ($45-$95) available for tonight and tomorrow. When The Boulder Blind Cafe returns to Colorado in July, I’m bringing the family. The experience was fantastic.

This apple and kale salad with parmesan, togarashi and almonds was Best of Show.

It doesn’t take ingenuity, tough work or insider knowledge to eat well in Boulder. It doesn’t always take a fat wallet, either (although a slender wallet poses challenges).

Two of Boulder’s better spots, Salt and Oak at Fourteenth, pack ’em in most nights. Salt’s dining room seemed poised to burst on Monday – yes, Monday – night. Restaurant Week added to the madness, but the density of diners was upped by just small degrees – it wasn’t a categorical difference.

On Tuesday, most of tables were filled, too, at Oak at Fourteenth, the site of a fire last spring that kept it shuttered until just months ago.